All That Remained of 100 Elephants: A Ton of Ivory, Turned Into Trinkets

Investigators found nearly a ton of ivory from elephant tusks at a jeweler’s office in New York City, transformed into beads and chess sets, bone-white animal figures and toys.

Todd Heisler / The New York Times

January 16, 2014

About New York

By JIM DWYER

On a winter day in 2012, a man named John C. Fitzpatrick made his way to the fourth floor of 7 West 45th Street, to the offices of Raja’s Jewels, where he expected that he would find a cache of ivory.

Shopping in the diamond district over the previous two weeks, Mr. Fitzpatrick had learned that Raja’s, operating from a suite of offices, supplied a few retail stores. This was valuable information: Mr. Fitzpatrick was actually a lieutenant for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, its chief investigator in New York City. So he arrived at Raja’s with a search warrant, accompanied by investigators from the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service.

Before the day was out, they had to send for a pickup truck. One of the investigators ran out to Staples to buy boxes. There was ivory in filing cabinets, piled on a floor in a back room. Close to a ton.

So much ivory, it filled 72 banker boxes.

That is: The contents of 72 boxes were essentially all that remained of more than 100 elephants that had been poached for their tusks — their incisor teeth, now transformed into beads and chess sets, bone-white animal figures, bangles and toys, charms and earrings, pendants and bracelets.

And that is: The largest land creatures on earth, slaughtered for trinkets, to the point where the African forest elephant could be extinct within a decade, according to Elizabeth Bennett, a species conservation scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society.

This dire situation exists even though international commercial trade in ivory has been outlawed by treaty since 1989, according to Dr. Bennett and other witnesses who testified on Thursday at a hearing held by the State Assembly.

“New York City has, by far, the largest market for ivory of any major U.S. city,” Dr. Bennett said. “In a 2008 study of the U.S. ivory trade, researchers found 124 outlets that sold more than 11,300 ivory products. This was in Manhattan alone.”

The city is a hub of trade for international poachers, who sell to both American and foreign markets. A man who lived as a hoarder in a tiny apartment in Flushing, Queens, bought $1 million in rhinoceros horn from an auction house in just one day. The rhino horn is prized in Asia as an aphrodisiac. The man was used as a straw purchaser for foreign buyers. Bear gall bladders are also heavily traded.

The hearing was called by Assemblyman Robert K. Sweeney, chairman of the Committee on Environmental Conservation, to ask experts how to improve the state’s law on the ivory trade.

It turns out that despite the 1989 ban, ivory can be legally sold if it was “harvested” before then. (While many animals can grow new horns, an elephant is killed in the removal of its tusks.) In theory, the state regulations require proof that the person selling ivory can show that he or she owned it before the ban. In practice, a permit can be obtained in perfunctory fashion, with a statement by an appraiser that the ivory is of the proper age.

There is no easy, inexpensive way to determine the age of a piece of ivory, according to Maj. Scott Florence, director of law enforcement for the Department of Environmental Conservation.

“I’ve seen pieces of ivory that have been stained to make them look as dark as this table,” Lieutenant Fitzpatrick testified, tapping on a table top that seemed to have a maple color.

One scientist testified that it might be practical to gauge the age of the animal that was the source of the ivory by testing for the presence of radioactive ions that were fallout from nuclear bomb tests in the late 1950s. That might provide an enforceable boundary line for sales, he suggested.

The illegal sale of ivory worth more than $1,500 is a Class E felony, the lowest felony there is, and is almost never accompanied by prison time. During the 2012 investigation in the diamond district, caches were found at three businesses: one worth $30,000; another worth $120,000; and the largest, at Raja’s, worth more than $2 million.

“You had three orders of magnitude, but all were charged with the same E felony,” Lieutenant Fitzpatrick testified. “It’s often the case that their lawyers tell them that they don’t have to talk to us because they are not going to jail anyway if they are tried and convicted.”

The owner of Raja’s, Mukesh Gupta, pleaded guilty. He was fined $45,000 for his ton of ivory.

He also forfeited the ivory, which is now being used for law enforcement training. New York City — the largest illegal-ivory market in the country — has a grand total of three state investigators.